The Thriller That Predicted the Russia Scandal

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From Politico:

David Pepper recently had to block someone on Twitter for the first time in his life, because he was tired of being accused, repeatedly, of hiding his real identity as a Russian spy.

“If I were a Russian spy, would I really release my plot in novel form in advance?” the 46-year-old Cincinnatian asks me, mock-bewildered, on a recent Friday morning. “Then I wouldn’t be a very good spy.”

The online tormentor isn’t just throwing out random espionage allegations for no reason. He’s decided to go after Pepper because his first book—The People’s House, a quick, lively thriller full of labyrinthine scandal and homey Rust Belt touches—reads like a user’s guide to the last two years in U.S. politics.

And Pepper wrote the book before any of it actually happened.

The People’s House centers around a Russian scheme to flip an election and put Republicans in power by depressing votes in the Midwest. Pipeline politics play an unexpectedly outsize role. Sexual harassment and systematic coverups in Congress abound. But it’s no unimaginative rehash. Pepper released the book in the summer of 2016, just as the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was heating up—and before Russia’s real-life campaign to influence the election had been revealed. In fact, the heart of the story had been written for three years when Russian government sent hackers to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee and sent their trolls to influence the election on social media. The Putin-like oligarch Pepper portrays as pulling the strings of U.S. politics had been fleshed out for two.

Using a self-publishing service, Pepper didn’t expect much of a reception, and he didn’t get one at first, beyond his amused friends and colleagues. But when a Wall Street Journal reviewer that November surprised him by calling The People’s House “a sleeper candidate for political thriller of the year,” that started to change.

. . . .

As he waited for edits on the first book, early in 2016, Pepper got started on a sequel, The Wingman. He finished the bulk of the manuscript by January 2017, as Trump was getting sworn in. Now, one year into Trump’s tenure, his second offering in the otherwise dull world of political thrillers—which comes out on Monday—is an equally complex tale of kompromat influencing a presidential election, even more sexual misconduct, and an Erik Prince-like military contractor with close ties to the administration, this time told through the lens of a rollicking Democratic presidential primary. He wrote it before the now-infamous Steele dossier became public knowledge (and before, Pepper says, he learned about it)—and months before revelations about the Blackwater founder’s close ties to the Trump team and its Russian entanglements. If the first parallels were eerie, these ones were, Pepper admits, maybe even spooky.

. . . .

The key to writing a successful political thriller is to come up with a scenario that’s far-fetched enough to stretch the reader’s imagination, but not so insane as to be wholly unbelievable. Two years ago, a successful Russian plot to throw an American election by manipulating the Midwest would almost certainly fall into the latter category. So might the idea of systematic blackmail of a presidential candidate.

Link to the rest at Politico